Against the war on women: V-day in the CongoStephen Lewis Remarks by Stephen Lewis, Co-Director of AIDS-Free World, delivered at the 10th Annual V-Day Celebrations, New Orleans, LA 4:00 pm CDT, Saturday, April 12, 2008.

Today is a day that has largely
--- and rightly --- been given over to Dr. Mukwege and his astonishing and
heroic work in the Congo. Driving the work is the endlessly grim and despairing
litany of rape and sexual violence. All of us assembled in the Superdome, talk
of V-Day and the Vagina Monologues; in the Congo there's a medical term of art
called “vaginal destruction.” I need not elaborate; you've heard Dr. Mukwege.
But suffice to say that in the vast historical panorama of violence against
women, there is a level of demonic dementia plumbed in the Congo that has seldom, if ever been reached before.

That's the peg on which I want
to hang these remarks. I want to set out an argument that essentially says that
what's happening in the Congo is an act of criminal international misogyny,
sustained by the indifference of nation states and by the delinquency of the
United Nations.

Dr. Mukwege and others have said
time and time again, the current saga of the Congo has been going on for more
than a decade. It's important to remember that it's a direct result of the
escape of thousands of mass murderers who eluded capture after the Rwandan
genocide , thanks to the Governments of France and the United States, by
fleeing into what was then called Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, The wars and the horror that followed have been chronicled by journalists,
by human rights organizations, by senior representatives of the United Nations
Secretary-General, by agencies, by NGOs internationally and NGOs on the ground,
by the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs, by the Security Council, and in the
process, accentuated and punctuated by the cries and the pain and the carnage
of over five million deaths.

The sordid saga ebbs and flows.
But it was brought back into sudden, vivid public notoriety by Eve Ensler's
trip to the Congo in July/August of last year, her visit to the Panzi Hospital, her interviews with the women survivors of rape, and her visceral piece of
writing in Glamour magazine which began with the words "I have just
returned from Hell". Eve set off an extraordinary chain reaction: her
visit was followed by a fact-finding mission by the current UN Under-Secretary
General for Humanitarian Affairs who, upon his return, wrote an op-ed for the
Los Angeles Times in which he said that the Congo was the worst place in the
world for women. Those views were then echoed everywhere (including by the EU
Parliament), triggering front page stories in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and a lengthy segment on 60 Minutes by
Anderson Cooper of CNN.

Largely as a result of this
growing clamour against the war on women in the Congo, and the fact that Eve
Ensler herself testified before the Security Council, the United Nations
resolution that renewed the mandate for the UN Peacekeeping force in the Congo
(MONUC as it's called) contained some of the strongest language condemning rape
and sexual violence ever to appear in a Security Council resolution, and
obliged MONUC, in no uncertain terms, to protect the women of the Congo. The
resolution was passed at the end of December last year.

In January of this year, scarce
one month later, there was an "Act of Engagement" -- a so-called
peace commitment signed amongst the warring parties. I use “so-called”
advisedly because evidence of peace is hard to find. But that's not the point:
the point is much more revelatory and much more damning.

The peace commitment is a fairly
lengthy document. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the word 'rape' never
appears. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the phrase 'sexual violence'
never appears. Unbelievably, "women" are mentioned but once, lumped
in with children, the elderly and the disabled. It's as if the organizers of
the peace conference had never heard of the Security Council resolution.

But it gets worse. The peace
document actually grants amnesty --- I repeat, amnesty --- to those who have
participated in the fighting. To be sure, it makes a deliberate legal
distinction, stating that war crimes or crimes against humanity will not be
excused. But who's kidding whom? This arcane legal dancing on the head of a pin
is not likely to weigh heavily on the troops in the field, who have now been
given every reason to believe that since the rapes they committed up to now
have been officially forgiven and forgotten, they can rape with impunity again.
And indeed, as Dr. Mukwege testified before Congress just last week, the raping
and sexual violence continues.

The war may stutter; the raping
is unabated.

But the most absurd dimension of
this whole discreditable process is the fact that the peace talks were "facilitated"
- they were effectively orchestrated -- by MONUC, that is to say, by the United
Nations. And perhaps most unconscionable of all, despite the existence for
seven years of another Security Council resolution, number 1325, calling for
women to be active participants in all peace deliberations, there was no one at
that peace table directly representing the women, the more than two hundred
thousand women, whose lives and anatomies were torn to shreds by the very war
that the peace talks were meant to resolve.

Thus does the United Nations
violate its own principles.

Now let me make something clear.
In the nearly twenty-five years that I've been involved in international work,
I've been a ready apologist for the United Nations. And I continue to be persuaded
that the United Nations can yet offer the best hope for humankind. But when the
United Nations goes off the rails, as is the case in the Congo -- as is invariably the case when women are involved -- my colleagues and I, in our
new organization called AIDS-Free World, are not going to bite our tongues.
There's too much at stake.

What makes this all the more
galling is that in many respects, the UN is the answer. Those of you who
intermittently despair of ending sexual violence should know that if the UN
brought the full power of its formidable agencies to bear, tremendous progress
would be made, despite the indifference of many countries. But therein lie
these cascading levels of hypocrisy.

You heard today about the
collective UN campaign to end rape and sexual violence in the Congo - twelve agencies united in this common purpose. But with the exception of some
magnificent UNICEF staff on the ground, about whom Ann Veneman, Executive
Director of UNICEF has every right to be proud, the presence of the other UN
agencies ranges from negligible to non-existent. This is all largely an
exercise in rhetoric. Even the UN Population Fund, ostensibly the lead agency
in the Congo, is pathetically weak on the ground, and on its own website talks
of the problems of funding.

It does induce a combination of
rage and incredulity when the UN tries to pawn itself off as the serious player
in combating sexual violence when the record is so appallingly bad. In fact it
could be said --- indeed, it needs to be said --- that the V-Day movement and
Eve, relatively miniscule players by comparison, have probably done more to
ease the pain of violence in the Congo than any one of eleven UN agencies. Who
else, I ask you, is building a City of Joy so that the women who have been raped
can recover with some sense of security and, become leaders in their
communities?

Is there an answer to this
collective abject failure of the international community to protect the women
of the Congo? There sure is, and the answer sits right at the top, and the
answer is the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

I don't know who is advising the
Secretary-General on these matters, but he's being led down a garden path soon
to be strewn with ghosts that will haunt his entire stewardship, and leave an everlasting
pejorative legacy. I know how the UN works; I've been an Ambassador to the UN
for my country, the Deputy at UNICEF, an advisor on Africa to a former
Secretary-General, and most recently a quote/unquote “Special Envoy.” In the
incestuous hotbed of the 38th floor of the United Nations secretariat, where
sits the Secretary-General, critics are scorned, derided, and mocked. And
exactly the same will happen to me. But I want all of you to know here
assembled that it need not be.

If the Secretary-General were to
exercise real leadership against sexual violence, instead of falling back ---
as his advisors have suggested --- on statements and rhetoric and fatuous
public relations campaigns, he could turn things around. What in God's name is
wrong with these people whose lives consist of moving from inertia to
paralysis?

The Secretary-General should
summon the heads of the twelve UN agencies allegedly involved in "UN
Action" on violence against women and read the riot act. He should explain
to them that press releases do not prevent rape, and he should demand a plan of
action on the ground, with dollars and deadlines. He should equally summon the
heads of the ten agencies that comprise UNAIDS and demand a plan of
implementation for testing, treatment, prevention and care for women who have
been sexually assaulted, with deadlines. I'm prepared to bet that UNAIDS has
never convened such a meeting, despite the fact that the violence of the sexual
assaults in the Congo creates easy avenues in the reproductive tract through
which the AIDS virus passes. Dr. Mukwege talks of increased numbers of
HIV-positive women turning up at Panzi.

The Secretary-General, taking a
leaf from Eve Ensler, should insist on a network of rape crisis centers, rape
clinics in all hospitals, sexual violence counsellors, and Cities of Joy right
across the Eastern Congo - indeed, across the entire country. The
Secretary-General should demand a roll-call, an accounting of which countries
have contributed financially to ending the violence, and in what amounts, plus
those who have not, and then publish the results for the world to see so that
the recalcitrants can be brought to the bar of public opinion (How's this for a
juxtaposition by way of example: over the course of over a decade, the UN Trust
Fund to end Violence Against Women has triumphantly reached $130 million. The United States spends more than $3 billion/week on the war in Iraq).

But there's more. The
Secretary-General should launch a personal crusade to double the troop complement
--- that is, MONUC --- in the Congo. The protection provisions in the new
so-called peace accord, for women, cannot be implemented with the current troop
numbers, large though they may seem.

And finally, the
Secretary-General should pull out all the stops in getting the United Nations
to agree that the Congo is the best test case for the principle of the
"Responsibility to Protect". This principle was universally endorsed
by Heads of State at the United Nations in September of 2005. It's the first
major contemporary international challenge to the sanctity of sovereignty. It
simply asserts that where a government is unable or unwilling to protect its
own people from gross violations of human rights, then the international
community has the responsibility to intervene. That responsibility can be
diplomatic negotiation, or economic sanctions, or political pressure or
military intervention - whatever it takes to restore justice to the oppressed.
Responsibility to Protect was originally drafted with Darfur in mind - it's
equally applicable to the Congo. We have to start somewhere.

The Secretary-General has a
tremendous challenge. He has the opportunity, and the wherewithal, and the
influence, and the majesty to save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of women's
lives - physically and psychologically. And once the process began in earnest
in the Congo, it would spread to all dimensions of violence against women
everywhere.

To whom else is such an
opportunity given? The Secretary-General of the United Nations has said that
violence against women is one of the gravest issues of our time. Well if that's
the case, surely he can understand that speeches aren't enough. And if he truly
believes what he says, then let him stake his tenure on it. I believe that the
struggle for gender equality is the most important struggle on the planet: Ban
Ki-Moon should say to the 192 countries that make up the United Nations:
"Either you give me evidence that we're going to prevail in this struggle
or you find yourself another Secretary-General."

"Ah," people will say,
"Lewis has finally lost it." I don't think so. We're talking about
more than fifty per cent of the world's population, amongst whom are the most
uprooted, disinherited and impoverished of the earth. If you can't stand up for
the women of the world, then you shouldn't be Secretary-General.

Alas, I guess I know whether
that will happen. We've already had signals.

Last fall, in an unprecedented
initiative, a High-Level Panel on Reform of the United Nations recommended the
creation of a new international agency for women. The recommendation was based
on the finding that the record of the UN on gender has been abysmal. If that
agency comes into being, headed by an Under-Secretary General, with funding
that starts at $1 billion a year (less than half of UNICEF's resources), and
real capacity to run programmes on the ground, issues like violence against
women would suddenly be confronted with indomitable determination.

The women activists on the
ground, the women survivors on the ground, the women activist-survivors on the
ground would finally have resources and support for the work that must be done.

But the creation of the new
agency is bogged down in the UN General Assembly, caught up in the crossfire
between the developed and developing countries. The Secretary-General could
break that impasse if he pulled out all the stops. He and the Deputy-Secretary
General make speeches that give the impression they support the women's agency,
but in truth the language is so carefully and artfully couched as to gut the
agency of impact on the ground, in-country, were it ever to come into being.
Again, the advisors read the tea leaves in a soiled and broken chalice.

This weekend has been filled
with hope in the struggle to end violence against women. Thoughtful, decent men
have come to the fore on this very platform, and women from so many countries
have made the case for sanity in words that are moving and compelling in equal
measure. I have chosen to link the Congo and the United Nations because as Eve
said at the outset, the Congo is the V-Day spotlight for the coming year, and
the United Nations can truly break the monolith of violence. We just have to
apply unceasing pressure so that the issue is joined rather than manipulated.

I don't have Eve's rhythm and
cadence. But I cherish a touch of her spirit, a lot of her anger and a
microscopic morsel of her trusting love, commitment and courage that will one
day change this world.